As our Tim Clark wrote when he complained about live service games wasting players’ time just to boost phoney player engagement numbers, “almost everyone reading this will be familiar with games that use predatory design in order to keep players logged in, whether that be to juice those all-important Daily Average User numbers so beloved of shareholders, or just in the hope that you might crack and drop some dollars in the MTX store.”
The main example he gave was of Hearthstone’s revised weekly quest system, which tripled the targets players would have to reach to clear those quests while only offering an additional 20% boost in experience points. It was not a popular change, to say the least.
Blizzard responded swiftly with the typical “we’ve heard your feedback” message, saying, “it’s clear that we pushed too far.” But rather than scrap the changes altogether, they’ve simply been revised, and not by that much. As the latest patch notes show, the new weekly quests are things like “Play Battlecry cards 75 times (instead of 100)” and “Win ranked Hearthstone games 10 times (instead of 15)”. While the initial change tripled the difficulty of completing quests, this iteration still doubles them, and for the same piddling increase in rewards.
Unsurprisingly, these adjustments haven’t gone down well with the community either, as you can see on Reddit. “Yeah this is still terrible number wise,” says one player, “100% more work to get like what 20% more exp? Do they even know basic math?” Another suggests that “we should demand full reversion…this is blizzards usually playbook. Make something way worse, then revert a little bit to appease us. Well blizzard I’m not gonna be appeased.” Other players are simply announcing their intent to uninstall. “I hate feeling like some weird corporate retention metric more than I like this game”, says one.
If you’re looking for an alternative, there are plenty of digital card games better than Hearthstone. And would you look at that, Magic: The Gathering Arena just got a new expansion—a set of cowboy-themed cards that encourage you to do crimes.